Reinventing Medium

update: The use of photography by the masses and the artists' use of the camera in an amateurish way is not what makes photography a theoretical object. Photography becomes a theoretical object because of its ability to "transform the specificity of its own medium" as well as that of the whole field of art and its other mediums. Something about the fact that
***mere framing the world (whether we take a picture or not) becomes an aesthetic act***
makes photography a theoretical object. How this happens ... needs another update for another time.


















but as "tourists and picknickers [sported] Pentaxes and Nikons" and DSLRs and Macro and fishi and telescopic lenses and photoshop filters and other professional-class equipment, "amateurism [ceased] to be a techincal category. So no longer could the artist have a certain non-art look. Utube and flickr soon took over as the mass social practice. photography with my view camera has become an "industrial discard" like the jukebox or the trolley car. It has become obsolete.

This is when artists like James Coleman comes in and uses a slide projector and strange techniques of double face-outs to bring attention back to the medium and address its structure.













The strangeness of his techniques and the less familiar nature of the obsolete projector brings more attention to the medium he is using and in effect Coleman addresses its mediation of reality and the difficulties of the photograph and the flat image to preserve likeness and authenticity.




Rosalind E. Krauss
Reinventing the Medium